Android port

Experimental port of Stellarium to Android using not-yet-complete Android port of Qt, necessitas.

This is an experimental branch built on an incomplete library and is not yet ready for public consumption.

An official public release won't happen until some time after necessitas reaches Beta, and this port is sufficiently mature, whichever comes later; testing releases will probably start well before then.

You can build it at any time, though (see: Building for Android). If you want to help out in any way with development, it would be appreciated.

Ensure that everything in QML is translatable, and in the gettext files

Accelerometer support

Fix large bugs and feature requests from pre-Alpha

Alpha testing

Optimize

Implement ETC1 texture compression

ETC1 may have issues with large chroma shifts, which could render it useless for us. If so, may have to use device-specific texture compression formats. => more work. We may want to move that way eventually anyways

Other

scientes suggested on IRC that we might create a multiplatform Location plugin, using QtMobility's Location API. This API appears to support desktop as well as mobile clients.

the location API should supported by necessitas, but may require some minor Android-specific hacks. See [4] and [5]

New issues

Known issues

Performance and CPU usage need to be looked at (above)

Check for NPOT texture support (driver may be returning true even if it's not)

do we care?

App should be suspended or outright killed when it's switched away from, as it continues to go full tilt and drain battery

need to (re)disable "Zoom to Fullscreen" option on tablets

it occasionally crashes very soon after starting; usually shortly after, or even during the loading screen

it may happen more frequently immediately after installing the app. The log and logcat output show nothing interesting.

this is associated with startup somehow; after the ~30 second mark, I've not seen it crash. I've had it running overnight unintentionally without instability.

Issues waiting for necessitas

necessitas bug #120 prevents us from using the package's Assets directory, as we would ideally do. For now, manually copy the files that get placed in stellarium/android/java/assets to /sdcard/stellarium on the device.

there's a fix that's yet to be reviewed

resuming the app (switching to another app, then back before Android closes it) results in a blank screen

Misc notes

Contributing

Building

Contributing

Right now, the main thing I need is development help. Please feel free to lend a hand; create a branch off the current one (see Building for Android) and go to town. Read above for means of communication.